The present invention relates generally to management of distributed computer-based resources, and more specifically, to dynamic property volatility assignment and assessment for distributed manageable resources.
Service infrastructures can allow for distributed heterogeneous resources to be managed using a centralized application. Management actions can include creating, retrieving, updating, and deleting resources distributed over a network using standardized management protocols. In order to remain abstract and usable by a wide variety of service infrastructures, standards such as Web Services Description Language (WSDL), Web Services Distributed Management (WSDM), Web Services Resource Properties (WS-ResourceProperties), Customer Information Manager—Extensible Markup Language (CIM-XML), and Web Services—Management (WS-MAN) have been developed that provide a means to not only access properties and methods of resources, but also to describe the resources through metadata and/or schemas.
For resource properties that are extremely volatile, such as power consumption, network throughput, and other metrics that are constantly changing, scalability can be achieved by keeping a centralized repository that tracks the history of these metrics. Typically these metrics are “pushed” or “pulled” at regular intervals and stored in a repository such as a database. This way when an end user or autonomic process needs to assess the status of the resources, the database can be quickly queried rather than invoking a slow network property retrieval to each of potentially thousands of endpoints.
Many resource properties have low volatility. An example is power status, which can be on, off, or standby, but may remain constant for weeks. Polling this status every few seconds may be extremely wasteful. Other resource properties never change during the lifetime of a resource, such as its key identifiers. The same low volatility often applies to relationships between resources. For example, a system process is typically contained in the same operating system for the duration of its lifetime.